Kosovo was last night back on a knife-edge of tension with the killing of two Serb brothers in unusual circumstances, threatening new fighting in advance of peace talks due to start in 10 days. The two men, Ljubisa and Radivoje Mitrovic, were driving out of their home village, Mijalic, where just 13 Serbs live in an area that is controlled by rebels, apparently to pick up the son of one of the men, a conscript coming home on leave.
Why they were driving through a known rebel checkpoint at dusk is unknown, as is the reason why their bodies were found 300 metres from their bullet-riddled car.
Guerrilla sources say they fired at the car as it raced through their roadblock.
They say the soldier, after his father failed to turn up, simply walked along a railway line that led to his village, straight into a rebel checkpoint where he knew some of the rebels, and told them he wanted to surrender.
"He surrendered to us without a fight, he said he wanted no more killing here. He is our prisoner, but we are treating him in a different way to a normal prisoner," said one guerrilla commander.
The area around Mijalic is already a hotbed of tension: the two highways linking the capital, Pristina, to Belgrade pass through the area and for months guerrillas have attacked army convoys in the area.
Last night, tanks, troops and artillery had massed for an attack on KLA positions around Mijalic, while several hundred ethnic Albanian civilians had fled from this and neighbouring villages by car, foot or horse-and-cart, fearing new fighting.
Serb officials have demanded that the monitors of the Organisation for Security and Co-operation in Europe help evacuate the 13 remaining Serbs in the village, but the OSCE says it is reluctant to do so, fearing it will be accused of helping ethnic partition.
"We helped evacuate Serbs from Podujevo [a nearby village] in January, we spent the next three weeks being told we were ethnic cleansing the village," said an OSCE spokesman.
"We are not keen to move villagers out of a village that is mixed.".
Monitors say they have another reason for refusing - if the Serbs are pulled out, the Serbian army may decide to flatten the village.
Meanwhile, fighting has continued elsewhere in the province: a fifth day of clashes broke out in mountains close to the Macedonian border, with 4,000 ethnic Albanian civilians spending another day trapped on hillsides with shells exploding nearby.
KLA units ambushed Serb forces near Podujevo in the north-east and Serb artillery hit rebel positions around Lapusnic, which lies astride the main east-west highway. With both Serb and rebel forces reinforcing positions around the province, there is little diplomatic activity.
Belgrade has positioned some 9,000 to 10,000 Serbian soldiers just north of Kosovo, the Pentagon said yesterday.